What I meant by "info bubble" is just all the things I'm aware of at this point in time. Presumably there are actions outside of my info bubble which are more beneficial (or more harmful) than any inside, simply because things I'm unaware of encompasses a much larger expanse of possibility space. This is more true the more insular my life has been up to the present moment. The fact that I didn't "sow my wild oats", as the expression goes, did spare me from some harm, but it also stopped me from discovering things that could have set my life on a different, more optimal path.
I suppose I didn't mean "wholistic" in quite that way. That said, maybe I should have. Perhaps as I level up according to my goals, I'll discover that I need to do these things too (or others I haven't thought about).
This leads me into a tangential question about goal-setting in general: What if I don't currently have enough information to know what I should be aiming for? What if there are unknown unknowns out there? How do I account for that?
Thanks for your thoughts; they're all good ones! I've actually already engaged with the Rationality literature enough to have encountered most of them (I'm about 2/3 through The Sequences at the moment).
I think after reading people's responses to this post, I realize that the scenario I outline here is even less likely than I originally thought. There are wrong ways to apply rationality, it's true. But those are the failure modes @LeBleu alluded to. For everyone else, Rationality isn't a destination, it's a path. The updating is continuous. What happened f
...Thanks for the welcome!
This is super helpful. It sounds like you've lived the thing that I'm only hypothesizing about here. Hopefully "Can't wait for round three" isn't sarcastic. This first round for me was extremely painful, but it sounds like round 2 was possibly more pleasant for you.
I like the framework you're using now, and I'm gonna try to condense it into my own words to make sure I understand what you mean. Basically, you're trying to optimize around keeping the various and conflicting hopes, needs, fears, etc. within you at least relatively cool
...Thanks for the tips!
Learning how to critique arguments is a skill you can study.
I suppose that large portions of The Sequences are devoted to precisely the task of critiquing arguments without requiring a contrary position. It's kind of an extension of a logical syntax check, but the question isn't just whether it's complete and deductively sound, but also whether it's empirically sound and bayesianly sound.
It's gonna take me a while to master those techniques, but it's a worthy goal. Not 100% sure I can do it on the timeline I need, but I can at least
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Classes with lots of tests are amazing, thanks to the testing effect.